Lumen Soup: Tests and Animatics compilation

Here's a massive compilation of (most of) the videos we have produced in the first 5 months of our projection animation theatre project. This includes several different visual tests and also the first rough edit of the two poems we will be performing (The first time you have seen anything of the stories here on the blog!).

We hope you enjoy seeing our imperfections, mistakes and laughs, and hearing our hilariously bad American accent placeholder voices - there'll be many more to come before we nail it!


Remember to click that lovely little HD button to see the whole video in high definition.




Tests include:

Watering can
Rabbit in the headlights
One eighty degree burn
Millers' door
Floating hands
Rebel shadows

Animatics include:

Millers' End
The Catipoce!

Lumen Soup video card

One Sheet/Poster

Here is the design for our 'teaser' poster, or One Sheet as it is called in the animation business. For the one we have displayed in the animation department, we printed the photograph of ourselves on a transparent sheet and mounted it a few millimetres above the background screen image (almost as if to imply some kind of CRAZY "three-dimensional" effect!!).  

Please feel free to print one of these images, in A2, and stick it on your bedroom wall, or turn it into a flag, or even a place mat for your dinner table. It has got soup on it already, so a bit more wouldn't hurt.

Newsreader

Tripods.

Okay, so I spent about 2 hours yesterday researching tripods.

It was SO EXCITING!!!

I originally wanted to find out if there is a tripod head which can securely hold a projector. If it's anything less than completely secure, Livvy's dad might worry about the safety of his projector...
Well, no one really makes projector-specific ones, but there are a few which are designed for laptops, and VCRs(?), apparently. This would be ideal for quick setups and touring where no ceiling mount is available.

Then I uncovered what seems like a secret cult of photographers who love their laptops so much that they can't resist having both a laptop and a camera on one tripod. Most of these systems are some kind of horizontal bar which fits to the tripod head...

The combined weight of a bar like this, the projector and my SLR would be about 6KG. This is actually quite a lot, which I never realised back in German lessons in year 8 when in my ignorance I ordered 20KG of apples in an oral exam.
So it goes without saying that a good tripod would be needed to support a system like this.

Researching my own tripod that I have used since the days of animating plasticine blobs - the one you can see in some of our production images - I have uncovered that not only is it a study tripod capable of supporting such weight, but also that it is over 30 years old! Wow. Apparently, that's a good thing. There's hardly any parts that aren't made of solid gunmetal.

Maybe I should add some tripod accessories to my Christmas list!  

Turnaround.

Turnarounddddd, every now and then I get a little bit lonely and you're never coming round..

Wait. What was I posting again?

Oh yeah. I made some turnarounds for Millers end, Billy and Mrs Wickerby.

Sorry nothing has been posted for a while, we are knee deep in script writing/animatics.

More things to come soon, promise! : >

Live-action hands and font test

In our quest for interesting illusions and nice little visuals for our Joiner scenes, we found inspiration in this video for the song Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire. It's obviously not some kind of live performance, but it may be possible for us to achieve something similar if we use a black enough screen...

So, for our latest test we recorded our hands in a green screen setup, and we are quite pleased with the results. The keying worked perfectly, so at least we know we can use a setup as simple as this for our actual production, providing it's only hands that need to be captured:

Luckily I've got enough green paper to cover a whole wall if needed, so plenty of chance to try a bigger setup next time!

After filming our hands, they were used to create an After Effects composition against a completely black background. This image was added to the composition and also put at the beginning of the exported video for size and position reference, as stupid as it looks:

At the same time we wanted to start testing pieces of typographic animation to be sync'd to things that we say. We dug out the lightbox and did a bit of traditional animation to create a speech bubble and the word 'JACK.' These were then captured and Fo' shopped into some tidy little animations which were then added to the After Effects Composition. 

Here's a video showing a couple of the green screen hand recordings, and then a few of the tests on the screen. Notice the reference photo at the beginning of each test, and my terrible timing at saying my name in time with the typography. Also, I disabled the audio track on the green screen recording, because at the time I was listening to Meat Loaf.  

Aside from the tests, we are currently working on the animatic for our project. Expect to see some animatic clips soon!

Millers' End: Video Test 1

Here's a quick video test demonstrating some basic interactivity in the context of a story we are using. We actually did this artwork and made the source video months ago - it was one of the first things we put through the projector! But this is the first time we have filmed it.

Our new botched test screen

As we are still in the land of doing tests, we have set up a temporary solution to not having a real venue yet! We have settled for my bedroom as the best place, eek. Looks like I'll have to get used to sleeping in a cinema!
After buying a king size white sheet from Argos, plenty of bargain black sheet things from Primark, two tension rods and a roll of super-strength Duck tape from Wilko's - we have got a functioning screen...

It could definately be improved for a few more quids, but it's good enough for us now. New HD video tests to follow soon...

Technical: Planned projection setup

Some of these details - such as seating and throw distance-  can't really be worked out yet until we know more about our venue. We are also still unsure about the idea of projecting onto the floor, but you can see there is about half a metre of floor projection on this image.

The Catipoce Car Concept

Here's a re-hash of the old car piece I did a while back, better suited to the Noir theme of our Catipoce style.

Joiner Scene Concepts

We've pretty much only just started exploring ideas for the joiner scenes. We need punchy little scenarios full of illusions and well-timed animation. More on this subject later...

Garden boy

Drew up a sketch of a garden boy,

I've been looking at 1950's style childrens illustrations and they have a lot of limited colour and out of line colouring styles.. So I thought I'd play around a bit. : >

I know his clothes aren't 1950's.. but all will be revealed!

Lady In black.

Drew up a ghostly old lady in cloak for the Millers End poem we've been looking at,

Then I stole Jack's BG and put it behind her with a nice blueish filter. : >

Miller's End Concept

Is it a ghost?

Who knows. Now, how do I make a garden look like it's from the 1940s, in a subtle way?

Catty concepts

Drawing some more Catipoce concept art.. If you don't know already I love cats. Big fat cats with funny squishy faces. So I'm having fun drawing up concept art for this character. : >

However We aren't sure how we want the creature to fare on the scare-o-meter.. The poem says that people are taken in by its charm and cuteness.. but its also a thing of terror..

So.. cute and dangerous? Hrmm.

Sai Noir

Playing around in Sai painter today and did a Film Noir-y style piece, just playing with colour and painting style - Just a sketchy piece but its a start!

I hardly ever do environment stuff, its a little scary and big for me -But I will prevail, I wanna be able to do some tasty backgrounds!

The Catipoce.

Read an awesome poem this week called the Catipoce.

Me and Jack have been discussing theme and genre and we thought Film Noir or B-movie horror would be cool-beans.

So I made some font tests and a little doodle of the catipoce.. but I don't know how I want his leggy bits to look like yet - possibly lizard legs, or caterpillar.. or tentacles. . Who knows!

on a side note, I downloaded Sai Painter and its lovely.. I have been drawing on it most of the week, harr.

More Concept Art

Some of these images have made me realise how important it will be for us to really get the BLACKEST BLACK in our projected images. True black will mean we can make parts of us invisible, in theory.

We also realise that in order to effectively have a foot of projection on the floor, the floor space should be covered in a material that is the same colour as the wall.

(look at the floor near the headlights on the car picture - I painted it white, but you can't make dark blue any whiter than dark blue!)

I think perhaps one of those seamless wall-floor screens that photography studios use would probably work well, as then it would be up to us to decide where the line is...if we even want a line, of course.

Disco dancing.

Playing around with lighting techniques in concept art, thus disco dancing... with cats.



I went on from this to play around with animation in Photoshop and did a rough test of the cat dancing.. I love colouring and layering in Photoshop but animation gets a little fiddly.. but I guess like anything it takes time to get used to.

His name is Claude.

Jeffrey Lewis

Here's a fantastic low-tech story-telling performance - just shows how you don't need fancy gadgets to tell a good story - just simple, captivating narrative and style.


Jeffrey Lewis & Champion Jim from trashcan on Vimeo.


We however will be using technology, but we don't want to compromise on storytelling.

Concept Art

It has been a little while since we really had things moving on here, but, well, we're going to have to dig down soon, aren't we?
So, back in Bristol and with the complete absence of a projector, we have decided to focus on the story and artistic side of things without having to worry about lumens or calibration.

After checking out the ins and outs of our new residence, we have found some useful places for practice and rehearsal (and, strangely enough, this place has an 'indoor garden' - you really have to see it to believe it...). We found a nice little room near a fire escape that looks like it has been largely undisturbed since the '70s, with a whitewashed wall.

Today we set up the camera in the room, put on our greys and did a few 'concept' scenarios. The idea is that we photograph ourselves in basic scene ideas and then layer on some art in Photoshop mainly using multiply layers to create a similar effect to a projected image. The layer of the original photograph isn't edited at all - we just slap stuff on top of it.

See our legs?

Nice UNITE carpet too.

The point of all this is to try some different styles, colour palettes and scenes, and also continue to think about what would be feasible with a projected image. Of course the scenes we are building in this concept art are exaggerations of the capabilities of a projected image - the image would be thrown slightly by our bodies, the brightness levels would be different and also from a live audiences' perspective it would be considerably harder to create the illusion - plus...these images don't move! Plenty of food for thought... 

Some of Livvy's art to follow shortly...

Banner

For John Parry:

Research?

We are already aware and inspired by a Cabaret group called '1927' which we will post about at a later date (they deserve their own post) but other than this touring group we don't know many more, so we decided to see if we could find some more.


We've spent a few hours scouring the Internet for Projection based performances. We haven't come up with much; firstly its difficult to know what search terms to use other than a mash up of the words 'projector' 'Animation' 'Theatre' and 'Performance'. We've come across countless examples of 'VJ' style projections and 3D video installation but nothing much along the lines of our project - which is both a good and bad thing. It's exciting that we haven't found anything like what we are working on as it means we are working on something quite original. However we have no one to place ourselves against and work off their mistakes (and triumphs..)

Although.. We did find this...


Projector Cape: Experiment #2 from REGULARMOTION on Vimeo.


But prehaps a little too much person/projector interaction..

Hollyoaks sees us through.

The problem with working with a projector is that the best time to test is when it gets dark, so we find we have to fill the day with something before nightfall.. One of these things is Hollyoaks. Or 'HOLLYOAKS TIEM' as we shout to one another on the strike of 7pm.
Our favourite character is Brendon Brady, played by Emmett J Scanlan (If you're reading this Emmett, as you have googled yourself and ended up reading this post and seeing this fan-art please email us .. We have need of your vocal talents.)

Non-HD Video: Test 4

In our opinion a successful test, even if we can't see it in the HD we'd like - our only current computer is kinda buckling under the strain of 1GB per 10 sec video...

Anyway, using the 180 degree digital painting, the idea was to simply pan the background whist the actor sort of spins around smoothly and slides across a bit. Now, this is considerably more difficult than it sounds, and we got the first idea of what a huge task it would be to rehearse a complete show made up of shots like this. After many takes and lols, we got a few that we were pleased with, including the one below.



Also this video is a bit strange in that the timeline believes it is 22 minutes long. I assure you it will be a very long time until we post a video that is actually 22 minutes long...

Visual Test 4: 180 Degree Pan from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Things to improve for next time: reshape the actor's light spot, increase size of orange spot, decrease contrast, make back of actor's spot black instead of brown and perhaps add another reference point such as a near-closeup object that moves at a different speed to the background.

Also, we made cookies today, full of M&Ms. Jack even time-lapse filmed them. But, we baked them for too long and they ended up as biscuits. And the time-lapse didn't come out very good because they didn't change at all. We better stick to brownies next time.

Test Visuals 3 & 4

This is a still image from another test, yet a pretty unsuccessful one: The aim of the test was create a visual of the actor behind a chain-link fence. We also used prison-bars, but this test was totally unsuccessful.

If you look at the chain-link the visual effect works out reasonably well, however the whole illusion is ruined by the top bar being distorted. The height of the fence is also a problem. However it is not all wasted effort, we will go back to this at a later date and sort out these problems as we feel this technique has definate potential.

This is a preview of a quick panoramic background drawn up on photoshop, The actual resolution is 5720-1080. (Three widescreen HD pictures side-by-side.) Long background is long. We wanted to create the illusion of a 180 degree camera turn but with a live actor.
The brief given for this background was : A darkish night sky (to play with light source), a point of interest and reference(the barn and trees) and the set dimensions.

This background was then taken into AFX to create the turn and the lighting - The video will be up later!

HD Video: Test Visuals 1&2

Here's a short video of 3 selected tests, including white background watering can from test 1, black background watering can from test 2, and headlights on the wall from test 2. Please ignore our random mumblings...


First Projector Tests from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Test Visuals:2

We have made some changes and also created a new test today. The new test was to create moving headlights against a wall, with a white space for the actor to move within the light spheres. 'Rabbit in the headlights' pretty much sums it up.
We have also filmed the experiments using manual settings on the Canon 7D instead of automatic, as this allows us to control focus and exposure. Here are some images from the tests. These pictures are raw 1080p unedited video frames.

Improvements for next time - Make the white space larger in the headlight test (you can see bricks on my shoulder), and maybe try some lighting and shadows on the extremely vibrant watering can. Other than that, the next tests will be new ones.

Video next...

Test Visuals: 1

For the past couple of days, we have been doing some simple visual tests with the projector, all captured on camera. Here's some frames from the video, soon we'll put a few edited clips on here!

This test was for one actor to lift a watering can and pour water over the other actor. The 'wet' actor would then shake off. Like a dawwg.

The watering can and the pouring water were digitally painted, then given some rough movement in AFX. The head shake water was made with one of the particle systems.

During our testing we have been trying different ways to use colour, brightness and composition. For this test, we created both a black and a white version - there are pros and cons of both, see for yourself. Whilst we both like the white version, we think that being able to create lighting effects and composition with the black background is more ideal. There will be few times in our final project when the lighting is quite as minimal as this, however.

After seeing the results, we have noted the following things to amend for the next test:

Decrease brightness of, enlarge and lower spotlights, also increase blurriness of spotlights, decrease opacity of watering can (it was so bright that the camera received it as orange instead of red when using black background), make watering can animation a bit smoother to help actor move with it.

Next test coming soon...

Projector Time!

So, in a nutshell, we are pursuing an idea which involves live actors performing with projected animation. The action will be highly synchronised, allowing the actors to interact with the animated image. The screen will cover a whole wall surface, but will be used selectively to create composition and lighting effects.

An essential part of this project will be the projector, no doubt about it. We've been doing loads of research and tests regarding projector units, screens, brightness, contrast and resolution amongst other things, it turns out projectors are actually very complicated. That is, of course, if you want the result to look better than a standard office presentation...

Fortunately, Livvy's Dad owns two projectors, one of which is installed here and has been available for our tests all summer. The other will hopefully be with us in Bristol within the next couple of months. The projector we have been using (the Panasonic PT-AE1000E) is very effective, as it is full HD, has a brightness of 1100 Lumens, a high contrast ratio and very quiet fans.

Now would be a good time to say that we plan to use full HD for this project. Utilising a HD projector, a HD DSLR, a PS3 and Blu-Ray media, we're not looking back!

Saying that, our tests are not in HD yet, as we don't currently have access to a Blu-Ray burner. Nevertheless, some of our tests will be on here soon...

Readings.

We want to produce something with story poems, aimed at children. So we trawled the 2nd hand book shops and my attic for poetry books. We did consider writing our own poems.. but that would be a project within itself!

Origins.

In the 2nd Semester of our 2nd year, we worked with Dan Keeble on a project entitled 'Steamwell.' This is due to be entered into the Disney ImagiNations competition in February 2011, before which we still need to produce final materials. When we discovered the competition and first started working out ideas, we shared an excitement of working on a project that is creatively and technically innovative, as oppose to an ordinary film concept.

Having attended animation festivals, screenings and events has shown us what a huge catalogue of media there is - ranging from widely accessible Hollywood-style films to niche art house pieces. We intend to create a project that is widely accessible but is also experimental. At the Encounters Festival and the Stuttgart Animation Festival, we have attended thought-provoking screenings and lectures concerning innovative, interactive and next-gen projects. The projects range from iPhone applications and BBC Big-screens, to interactive experiences and digital theatre/cabaret. The latter are often aimed specifically at niche audiences - young, creatively-minded independent film-lovers. We believe that this audience can be opened up to be more inclusive.

Taking all of this into account, we feel passionate about this type of project - nevertheless, we have never done anything like this before; there will be trial and error, there will be hurdles to overcome but hopefully the end product will be successful!

Plus, Livvy's dad has got a projector. A good one.

Starting Point.

Hello! We're Livvy Brewer and Jack Norris, two animation students about to enter our 3rd and last year of study. This Blog is a gathering of thoughts, concepts and anything else that falls under the umbrella of 'Lumen Soup'!
Lumen Soup is a collaborative project which will eventually form an alternative film piece, exploring animated mixed-media theatre.
More will be revealed in posts to come...